Back in the earlier months of the Iraq war, around the time it was becoming apparent to everyone except Bush and his inner circle that the war was an unfolding disaster, Bush and Tony Blair held a joint press conference at the White House.    
When a reporter directed a question at Blair, he was like Derek Jeter, fielding a range of difficult questions with effortless competence, speaking without notes, delivering cogent, credible answers. By contrast, each time Bush answered he furrowed his brow and looked down at a stack of index cards, shuffling among them looking for a talking point that most closely matched the question. Even with pre-printed answers, his responses were stilted, awkward, slightly off key and delivered with his characteristic Jed Clampett diction. It was a national embarrassment, and it would have been funny had it not illustrated such a pathetic contrast between the intellectual capacities of the two leaders. For Bush, the episode was just one among dozens of similar performances over the years featuring a whole dispiriting litany of malapropisms, tortured syntax, or an otherwise idiotic mangling of the English language.
    Fast forward to the summer of 2008, where the same sort of contrast exists in the presidential campaign. In Barack Obama we have a candidate whose command of the language is masterful. Off-the-cuff or in interviews his grasp of the facts seems comprehensive. He is clearly very smart. The press conference in Jordan showcased his ability to articulate the nuance and complexities of difficult issues. In prepared speeches his rhetoric soars.
    But lately the punditocracy has suggested that perhaps Obama is “too” articulate, too polished, too erudite. Good grief. George Will sniffed that he was a “cosmopolitan.” Patrick Buchanan, who was a fan of the late Generalissimo Franco, and who recently authored a book sympathetic to Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime, the man who declared a “cultural jihad” in 1992, wondered, with chilling implications, whether Obama was “one of us.”
    No such questions are raised about McCain. Like the pathetic Bush, McCain relied on note cards when he visited a supermarket to talk about food prices. But if McCain seems doddering at times, confuses Sunni with Shiite, is clueless about economic issues and how a computer functions, doesn’t know that Czechoslovakia hasn’t been a country since 1993, makes crude and stupid remarks about cigarettes killing more Iranians, doesn’t know that Iraq and Afghanistan don’t share a common border—all that’s OK with the yahoo class. He’s “one of us.”
    That’s why the polls remain close. If, after eight years of the George Bush- engineered train wreck—the trashing of the Constitution, the debacle in Iraq, standing by and doing nothing as the economy goes off a cliff—if after all that we a elect a candidate in McCain who is almost as clueless and inarticulate and even more warlike, God help us all. This country will be beyond redemption, and not worth redeeming anyway.